Training Industry Quarterly - Fall 2011 - (Page 18)

ORGANIZATIONS ARE NOW ABLE TO MORE EFFECTIVELY SOLVE REAL BUSINESS AND EF ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEMS Extending, Enhancing, E tending, Engaging The following examples show what organizations are doing today to enable, extend and enhance learning and ensure on-thejob performance in new, different and, more importantly, effective. Their solutions range from low-tech to high-tech, low-touch to high-touch, formal to informal and social, and often a true blend. Cisco is committed to sustaining a culture of innovation and operational excellence in order to fulfill its vision to provide products and services to “change the way we work, live, play and learn.” In the product engineering organization, the belief is that as the community of engineers share their knowledge and expertise amongst each other, this inspires the community to re-use and re-apply ideas so that teams become more capable and productive. Their integrated solution includes: The Community Learning Network, a high leverage, low-cost vehicle to facilitate community learning across organizations through events and activities; and, the Community Learning Library, a vehicle to collect, store and make this learning accessible through social networking approaches (i.e., search, view counts, user ratings, tags and sharing). By working closely with executive leadership, they have incorporated rewards and recognition into the program and provided tools and resources to make it easy to share. In addition, these leaders have also dedicated their personal time to support these activities as speakers, panelists and advisors. While the traditional industry learning metrics are strong as compared to benchmarks (i.e., learner satisfaction and cost), executives are expecting (and seeing) business results, such as new innovative products and cost savings. As important, the engineers value their learning experiences, with quotes like this, from one of the thousands of engineers that participate at the conferences, “The Demo Expo conference gave a full 360 degrees of pure technical bliss.” “This is real…we’re doing it big time. Just had an incredible interview with one of our distinguished engineers who was inspired at an internal conference, built an innovative product, and it resulted in over $10M in savings,” said Greg Brower, manager of the learning and development solutions group at Cisco. The associate development team at jcpenney, one of America’s leading retailers operating over 1,100 department stores throughout the United States and Puerto Rico and one of the largest apparel and home furnishing sites on the Internet, jcp.com, recently rolled out training on a new 30-step business process. Previously, participants would have come to a classroom to listen to corporate instructors teach. This time they created an integrated program using a variety of media (i.e., a leader’s discussion guide, a DVD) and approaches (i.e., an illustrated activity book for each participant, group exercises to reinforce the learning). And, the divisional merchants themselves acted as on-site facilitators leading the training activities in their own meeting rooms, providing their expertise and giving the learning immediate context. The result was that 900+ associates were trained in four weeks with very positive participant feedback like, “This nces with ith was one of the best experiences I’ve had with d process ” driving home a disciplined process.” TELUS, a leading Canadian telecommunications company, has implemented an organizational learning model called “Learning 2.0” which integrates formal, informal and social tools and approaches. In addressing learning needs, they apply a formal/informal/social filter to the design that permits innovative, blended solutions from the outset. Conversely, they have also established processes and systems at an organizational level that enables learning to occur serendipitously. As an example, their “Welcome to TELUS” induction program was completely overhauled from a singular, stand-alone classroom event to a complete package of formal, informal and social learning options through the first 90 days of their employment including virtual world collaboration sessions, online scavenger hunts, live face-to-face fireside chats, discussion forums and micro-blogging groups. “Having a solution that incorporates formal, informal and social learning allows there to be an ecosystem model of people, content and knowledge … at all levels of depth … versus only one single source of competence,” said Dan Pontefract, senior director and head of learning and collaboration at TELUS. In order to address the learning goals for their National Sales Meeting in a new way that reflected how their sales reps actually worked, Constellation Academy of Wine implemented the Que Syrah game. In this “mirror world” sales reps were able to practice the skills needed to operate in complex situations: analyzing their customers’ needs, being experts in their products and tying the products to the customer needs, utilizing appropriate messaging and building strong customer relationships. Through blending simulation, game elements, social networking sites and live interactions, sales reps had a more immersive learning experience that Additional Resource Knowledge Works Foundation’s 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning” contains thought-provoking ideas and is a useful tool for thinking about, preparing for and shaping the future of learning in your organization. Particularly check out the, “Design as Philosophy” key theme. 18 Training Industry Quarterly, Fall 2011 / A Training Industry, Inc. ezine / www.trainingindustry.com/TIQ http://www.jcp.com http://www.futureofed.org/ http://www.futureofed.org/ http://www.trainingindustry.com/TIQ

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Quarterly - Fall 2011

Training Industry Quarterly - Fall 2011
From Where I Sit: Back to the Basics
Table of Contents
Ad Index
The Learning GPS
Work that Stretches: The Best Teacher
The Promise and Peril of Social Enterprise
Technical Training: How is it Different?
Companies Press 'Play' on Training Games
Redefining the 'e' in e-Learning
Essential Components for Effectively Training a Global Workforce
Five m-Learning Considerations for Your Talent Management Strategy
Instructional Design: Learning Meets Technology
Improving Training: Thinking Like a Game Developer
Casebook: Pfizer: Moving Product Sales Training Online
Why is Mobile Learning Not More Popular?
Tweet Suite
Company News
Closing Arguments: The Three T's

Training Industry Quarterly - Fall 2011